Saturday, March 04, 2006

Stretching Your Self

It was Wednesday morning when I learned how to do it. My limbs were stiff and
sore from sitting at the conference tables all day on Monday and Tuesday. My
whole body was in some degree of pain. I needed to work out the knots somehow.
But how?

In the last few weeks, I've been learning to disbelieve in
obstacles. I used to have that attitude when I was younger, but it was very
superficial. I would talk a good game, but when things actually got difficult I
would chicken out, or decide that what I was after wasn't really that
important, after all.

But in mid-February, I attended a workshop
that was supposed to be on Internet marketing topics. However, most of the
speakers at the workshop talked about their personal histories in ways that
made me realize that they were successful in direct proportion to the degree
that they made conscious use of the thing I've been calling "command mode".

None of them called it that, of course, especially since none of them
read my blog. (At least, not as far as I know!) However, one of the speakers
was a fitness guru who has previously spoken about the importance of using
visualization and feeling while exercising, and it reminded me of one of the
first times I "discovered" command mode.

It was several years ago
that I first stumbled onto the key to command mode, but I didn't know what I
had found at the time. What happened was that I was doing some aerobic
exercise, and as my mind wandered, I thought about what I wanted to look like
physically, mentally projecting a "future self". I then moved that image so
that it overlapped my body as I was running, as I wondered what it would feel
like to be doing the same exercise with that future body.

What
happened shocked and surprised me. The effort I was putting out to do the
exercise dropped dramatically. It was as if I was actually exercising with my
future body. Since the exercise was supposed to be effort-based, I had to
exercise much harder to produce the same sensation of effort!

Now,
if you think that's crazy, here's an even crazier thought: I didn't do it
again, except maybe once or twice just for the heck of it. In fact, it wasn't
until a few months ago that I "rediscovered" it while running on a treadmill. I
just happened to do the same thought process, and it was as if the treadmill
had slowed to a crawl. I had to nearly double my running speed to get the same
perceived effort back. I then remembered the previous experience from a few
years prior, and thought, "ah, there it is again." And then, like an idiot, I
promptly forgot about it again.

Of course, the problem is that I
didn't really know what I had discovered. I had even heard once that you should
visualize the results you want when you exercise, but I didn't really make the
connection. Visualizing the result isn't enough, however. Have you ever heard
that saying about how you should dress for the job you want, not the one you
have? Well, I discovered that the best way to increase your workout intensity
is to exercise with the body you want, not the one you currently
have.

But the effect isn't limited to exercise, and I didn't really
make that connection until sometime after writing Being the Body, before
I began documenting the idea in Pleasure,
Prediction, Progress. You see, in-body visualization will let you do pretty
much anything; it's essentially a direct line to your "other self".

But back to the workshop I was in a few weeks ago, and the fitness guru. One of
the stories he told was that he actually stumbled on this concept two or three
times, using it to win various athletic competitions, but not making it a habit
and therefore not having things go as well all the time. Finally, he learned to
use it consciously, built his current business empire, and has been teaching
the concept to others ever since.

So, while I already was aware of
the technique myself, and had stumbled on its importance in limited
applications, getting to hear all these speakers and see the different ways
they had applied it was a real eye-opener. It was like I had invented the
internal combustion engine, but these guys were already selling cars, trucks,
and boats. I had no idea that it was so powerful and could be used for so many
things. I had only used the idea in "first gear", and these guys were
racing.

What would you do, if you knew you would not fail?

So I learned a lot in a few days, and I don't mean that I
picked up a lot of information -- though I did that too. It was the kind of
learning that actually changes you. The speakers challenged us to stretch our
ideas of what was possible for us; to make true commitments, and to affirm our
worth with our actions, not our words. And their words echoed in my head long
after I left the building, forcing me to stretch my self-concept beyond its
previous limits.

They stirred up a conflict in me, between fear of
success, and fear of failure. They made me realize that I was comfortable with
failure in my personal life, as long as it was due to half-measures. As long as
I hadn't fully committed myself, I could shrug it off as "not really my
fault".

The real breakthrough took place after the workshop was
over, the night before I headed home. I had been agonizing over whether or not
I should join the very expensive follow-up coaching program that had been
promoted at the workshop. On the one hand, I felt that the cost of the program
and its regular deadlines would be a good spur to action. On the other, I
feared that the program would just be a crutch to prop up my inability to
follow through, or worse still, that nothing would come of it and I would just
be wasting the money.

After talking with Leslie on the phone for
quite some time that evening, however, I finally realized the flaw in my
reasoning. At some point, it dawned on me that it didn't matter what I chose to
do, or what the outcome was, because I was treating it as a given that I
would fail. That is, I was thinking that these were the only options:

Take the additional coaching and fail, wasting the money

Take the additional coaching and succeed, but still be a failure because clearly I needed a crutch

Not take the coaching and fail

The logical fourth possibility, of not taking the coaching but succeeding
anyway, was not something I seriously considered. I basically believed that
what would really happen would be that I'd make some show of effort, let it
fall off, and then blame the circumstances for the failure, such as telling
myself I should've gotten the coaching after all.

The truth was, I
simply didn't believe in any possibility of success, and I didn't believe in
myself. Not only that, but I realized that I was actually comfortable
with that belief. Indeed, the option that seemed most comfortable for me was to
not take the coaching and fail, because it offered the most convenient
rationalization and would have the least damaging consequences of the choices.
I wouldn't be out any more money, I wouldn't blame myself, and I wouldn't have
to do as much work!

The Lives We Deserve

As I mentioned in Life is Every
Moment, the truth is that we all have the life that we in some sense
"deserve". Not in the moral sense, but in the practical sense. We have the life
that results from the decisions we make, and we make the decisions we do
because of our perception of the costs and benefits involved. And if we are
unaware of how we "score" the costs and benefits, we may well be doomed to
making decisions that result in a life we don't really want to have.

And clearly, that was the case for me. As soon as I realized how I was scoring
my options, it became quite clear that the rules had to change. If I didn't
believe in myself, it literally didn't matter what decision I made. The game
was rigged, and I was bound to lose. "What a strange game, Professor Falken. The only winning move is not
to play."

So here's the crazy thing, the thing that you must
understand if you want to do anything different with your life than you've
already done: the rules will work just as well if you run them in
reverse. No system works unless you do. But every system
works if you do.

When you don't believe in yourself, any
action you take leads to failure, because your goals themselves contain
failure, embedded in their very definition. If your definition of success is to
fail, then failure becomes your success!

I saw this in a flash, in the
moment that I realized all the options I was contemplating led to a failure of
some kind. If I hadn't spent so much time talking to Leslie about them, I
probably wouldn't have even noticed it, but having to put my thoughts into
words forced me to see the trap I was in.

And as soon as I saw what I
was doing, the trap fell apart, because it was obviously reversible. If I could
create a mental structure in which all roads lead to failure, then I could do
the same with success.

If you can fail, you can succeed!

It was a mind-boggling thought. If you can fail,
you can succeed! If you can manifest your belief in failure in spite of your
best efforts to succeed, then what could you do if you actually believed in
success?

What they found is that the
way we act has little to do with how we think we will act, or how we "decide"
to act. Mostly, our actions are decided unconsciously, with relatively little
conscious input. Simply mentioning a concept to someone can dramatically
affect their tendency to behave in ways related to that concept, as long as
there's no conscious interference. Indeed, they were able to enhance people's
performance on a variety of tasks, just by mentioning the idea of
high achievement!

Given that, how hard is it to believe that what
you think or believe about yourself or your goals would have an impact on your
behavior? Not very!

Of course, I hadn't read that article a few weeks
ago, and I'm only mentioning it in order to give you an additional basis for
understanding and believing what I'm telling you now. At the time, I just
grasped the idea in a flash, seeing it as a natural extension of the Multiple Self
concept and typical "manifestation" psychology.

And once I had that
idea, everything changed for me, again. The very
next day, after I drove home from the workshop, I began learning to draw, and
also to do a bunch of other stuff that had been taught at the workshop. I only
had a few days before I had to leave for PyCon, though, so I hadn't really had
much time to explore the many possible manifestations of "command mode" that
I'd thought of.

Stretching the Body, as well as the Mind

Which brings me back to Wednesday morning, when I
discovered that I could use "command mode" to stretch my muscles and restore a
lot of the flexibility I had lost over the years. After several experiments, I
determined that the best thing to do was to imagine my whole body as elastic,
like a rubber-bodied superhero stretching every which way. I would stretch as I
exhaled, and any muscle that felt tight I would specifically command with the
word "lengthen", sometimes touching that muscle to get feedback that it was
actually relaxing.

One of the really wild things about this process is
that it was actually as if my legs and arms and spine did grow longer when I
told them to. It was just a little spooky, although it was also apparent that
the lengthening was due to the release of muscle tension and a subtle flexing
of my joints, rather than to any real magic.

Nonetheless, after 15 or
20 minutes of experimentation, I found I had become flexible enough to touch my
heels to the top of my head - something I'm not sure I was ever able to do
before. Similarly, I can now fold my legs into what I'm guessing would be a
three-quarter lotus position, and I remember that I used to struggle with even
a half-lotus position when I lived in Dallas and did zazen at the MKZC. It's
especially impressive given that I weigh about 100 pounds more than I did
then!

Since I got back from PyCon on Wednesday, I've been further
experimenting with the stretching, to the point of attempting -- but not quite
achieving -- the "splits" in both the forward-backward and side-to-side
positions. However, I'm fairly sure that I have never gotten so close in my
life. And as I've become more flexible, I've been feeling much younger and more
energetic.

But I would never have succeeded in doing these stretches,
or any of the other "stretches" I'm making in my life right now, if it hadn't
been for that first insight. I wouldn't have learned to draw, if I gave up at
the first sign of difficulty -- and I was very much tempted to.

Nor are
stretching and drawing the only things I've tried. I had to get up pretty early
(for me, anyway) on Monday and Tuesday, and I did it by visualizing the night
before (in command mode, of course). I created a detailed picture of what
things I was going to do and when, and when I woke up the actions were more or
less automatic; I didn't spend a lot of time arguing with myself over what I
should do or whether I should hit the snooze button on the alarm. I hadn't done
these things for Sunday morning, and got up much later than I'd intended.

Since I got back on Wednesday, I've been following a rather intense
schedule. Stuff is flying off my to-do lists like crazy, and I'm not feeling
even the least bit stressed about how much I'm planning to accomplish in the
next few weeks. If I had seen this list a month ago, I suspect I'd have spent
the better part of a day reading Bloglines or Reddit just to avoid facing it.
:) Now, I'm planning to accomplish it all in about two weeks. It's going to be
quite a -- dare I say it? -- stretch.

So what's the moral of this
little story? Well, there are several, but I think I'm going to leave them to
you to figure out. In the meantime, be well, and remember to stretch yourself
-- and maybe your self-concept, while you're at it. You're probably a lot more
flexible than you think.